The Fiercely team attended a very significant IT conference in the Europe, IP EXPO Europe (Twitter).
During these 2 days, the team had the chance to meet with several different vendors in the fair and also attend some interesting talks in the conference.
At the fair, we would like to point out the very nice talk we had with the guys from Puppet and Chef, two major references in the automation and provisioning domain. It’s interesting to find out that, although with different implementation approaches, both are working towards a more robust way of delivering software based on provisioning automation.
From the talks, of course we followed with higher interest the DevOps track, which was also the one with greater attendance. We would like to mention a very good talk from Matthew Skelton (slides here) on Continuous Delivery anti-patterns. Many of the suggested patterns are aligned with solutions we have effectively applied when we find these (surprisingly recurring) anti-patterns. Organizations need to understand that in order to improve their capabilities, they need to transform their way of working, and not just choose a different toolset or framework.
Relating these two aspects, vendors and experiences, we somehow felt that, generally, organizations are not there yet. We talked with some people attending and there are still a lot of them asking for the right tool/framework for implementing DevOps, and not understanding that the main issue here is the transformative mindset and not the tools.
Finally, we also had a very nice bonus, being able to attend a community session for DevopsLondon, which was referred to us by the guys from Prism Digital.
Besides meeting very interesting people, we really feel that we are working towards the right path and that we really are helping our customers improving by doing the right thing and doing it right.
If the current state of business imposes different demands, why do software engineering teams stay the same? We need to do things differently so that we can improve our collective performance.
